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Localize Your Pip Dependencies

I recently introduced a pip package with pypi.org dependencies into my team’s continuous integration pipeline. Due to the nature of our industry, predictability, repeatability, and traceability are high priority concerns for our customers. For this reason, it’s critical that our build and test infrastructure does not rely on any externally-hosted dependencies.

Thankfully, localizing your pip dependencies is incredibly easy thanks to the pip2pi package. You can create a local PyPI-compatible repository from any package (and its dependencies) in one line:

pip2tgz "/var/www/packages" mypackage

Users can install these packages with the following command:

pip install --index-url="file:///var/www/packages" mypackage

Reducing the number of potential points of failure was my intention when I stumbled on pip2pi, but using it also made a significant difference in the initialization time for our pipelines that depend on pip packages.

I hope this article was useful. You can follow the discussion on reddit here.